PAN: There were no employment opportunities and any projects to attract workers, the youths complain, on the other hand current drought caused the locals in this Northern Province to sell their animals on through away prices and go where they can help their families living.      Full news...

The New York Times: AFGHANISTAN emerged as the world's third most volatile country, topping even Iraq, according to a report published yesterday, two days after Afghanistan's bloodiest attack in months on a non-government organisation.      Full news...

Le Monde: Afghanistan should be a textbook case, a model, the very paradigm of the "reconstruction" of a failing state under the auspices of a mobilized international community. There were so many hopes and promises right after the 2001 fall of the Taliban regime which al-Qaeda had made its rear base!      Full news...

The Financial Times: The international aid effort in Afghanistan is in large part "wasteful and ineffective", with as much as 40 per cent of funds spent going back to donor countries in corporate profits and consultant salaries, Kabul-based charities will say today.      Full news...

AP: The prospects for peace in Afghanistan are being undermined because Western countries are failing to deliver on aid promises — and because much of the aid money they do send is going to expatriate workers, according to the Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief, an alliance of 94 international aid agencies.      Full news...

AFP: Gunmen killed five Afghan mine clearers in an ambush on their convoy in northern Afghanistan, their UN-funded company said Monday, in one of the bloodiest attacks on non-government workers in months.      Full news...

PAN: A 16-year old girl was kidnapped by unknown armed men in the Nahreen District of Baghlan province. The parents of 16-year old Guldana claimed that she had been kidnapped by a group of five unknown, armed men in the middle of the night in the New City area.      Full news...

Belfast Telegraph: US soldiers have killed six Afghan civilians during a military raid in the east of the country this morning, according to a local official. A woman and two children are said to be among the dead following the operation in the village of Hom, close to the Pakistani border.      Full news...

Chicago Tribune: The homes in the fancy Shirpoor neighborhood are a child's fantasy of mirrored columns, rainbow-colored tiles, green glass, imposing arches and high gates. They also are evidence of what has gone wrong with Afghanistan, almost seven years after the Taliban was chased from power into the mountains.      Full news...

Internationalen Weekly: Undeterred by the “international community’s” political exigencies, the Afghan woman has not given up her struggle for peace, democracy, liberation as well as her right to education, health and work. Nowhere, perhaps nowhere in the world, one finds a woman as keen for education as an Afghan woman. And embodiment of this struggle is RAWA, the Revolutionary Association of the Woman of Afghanistan. Alerting the world since 1977 to the sufferings and struggle of Afghan woman, RAWA is the only woman, if not political, formation to have survived 30 years of Afghan war. An achievement in itself. ‘There is no organization on earth like it’, says John Pilger.      Full news...

The Independent: Two women and two children were killed in an air strike called in by British forces in Afghanistan, the Ministry of Defence said. It is understood that the incident in Helmand Province took place after British troops had called in air support to help extricate them from a Taliban ambush at an undisclosed location in the southern part of the war-ravaged province.      Full news...

Novinite.com: The Afghan authorities and Afghanistan's Embassy in Bulgaria are searching for their former ambassador to Sofia who has not come back to her home country after her term of office expired.      Full news...

The Independent: There is no one as colourful and controversial among the warlords of Afghanistan as General Abdul Rashid Dostum, a man of immense power and huge wealth whose name became synonymous with bloodshed and betrayal during the long years of conflict.      Full news...

IRIN News: Food shortages in Ajristan District of Ghazni Province, central Afghanistan, have forced some families to eat dried grass in order to survive, local people and the district administrator told IRIN.      Full news...

PAN: Poverty and parental fights led a young girl named Farzana in Jowzjan province in Northern Afghanistan to hang herself and commit suicide.      Full news...

Spero News: Since March of 2007 until now, there has been a 40% increase in reports of physical violence against women in Afghanistan, according to United Nations sources.      Full news...

Green Left Weekly: It has to be one of the most unbelievable stories of the century: New Idea, a magazine that trades on gossip about royals and other celebrities, is blamed for exposing Prince Harry’s deployment in the British military intervention in Afghanistan. It is about as believable as the plot of Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper, in which a young prince swaps places with a street lad to see what life is like in “Paupersville”.      Full news...

PAN: Five Taliban militants, who escaped from the heavily-fortified Pul-i-Charkhi Prison on the eastern periphery of Kabul a day earlier, had been sentenced to death and long jail terms, one fugitive said on Thursday.      Full news...

The Financial Times: The UN International Narcotics Control Board says the rise in Afghanistan's opium cultivation is "alarming" and that its effects - including an increase in organised crime, corruption and the incidence of drug use - are spilling over into Iran, Pakistan and the central Asian republics.      Full news...

IRIN News: Saliha still mourns the death of her three-year-old daughter, Halima, who died due to severe diarrhoea at a hospital in Kunar Province, eastern Afghanistan, on 11 January. The child had drunk contaminated water which Saliha's family collects from a nearby river and uses for all purposes, including drinking, cooking and washing.      Full news...

Rabble.ca's Derrick O'Keefe recently gathered a significant statement by Malalai Joya, one of the more courageous and heroic political figures in Afghanistan today. She makes the memorable statement below about the billions of dollars in military spending and aid money which has effectively been squandered in Afghanistan by the run-away corruption of the Karzai government.      Full news...

UN News Centre: Some 24,000 Afghan women die every year while giving birth, according to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), which is working with the Government and other partners to reduce maternal mortality and improve the overall health of women and girls in the war-torn nation.      Full news...

CBC News: More than six years after the United States invaded to establish a stable central regime in Afghanistan, President Hamid Karzai's government in Kabul controls just 30 percent of the country, says the top U.S. intelligence official.      Full news...

RAWA: The woman belonging to Gulran District of Herat province in Western Afghanistan had been burnt with hot water, a bullet had been found buried in her abdomen and her hair had been pulled out with his hands. She says he fired on her by a pistol but she survived.      Full news...

The Independent: Girls as young as six are being married into a life of slavery and rape, often by multiple members of their new relatives. Banned from seeing their own parents or siblings, they are also prohibited from going to school. With little recognition of the illegality of the situation or any effective recourse, many of the victims are driven to self-immolation – burning themselves to death – or severe self-harm.      Full news...

RAWA: A fourteen-year old girl named Bashira belonging to Sar-e-Pul province was gang-raped by three men on February 18, 2008. One of the rapists is Najibullah, the son of Haji Payinda, a member of parliament from Sar-e-Pul.      Full news...

The Times: On the outskirts of Kabul stands probably the nicest prison wing between Warsaw and Tokyo — complete with security cameras, electronic locks, shaded visiting areas and UN-approved levels of natural light.      Full news...

RAWA News: Late Sunday, February 3/4, 2008 in a compound in Bakwa district, Shagay area of Farah Province. NATO occupation and Afghan forces carried out an air and ground assault upon a home where allegedly a Taliban commander was present. Eleven people were killed in the air strike including seven members of one family – a woman, 2 children, and 4 men. The raiders also abducted seven family members to a fate unknown. The photo from Iran’s Alalam News shows relatives mourning the dead. The names of the victims were provided to the author by the Afghan women’s organization, RAWA.      Full news...

AFP: Afghanistan is sitting on a wealth of mineral reserves -- perhaps the richest in the region -- that offer hope for a country mired in poverty after decades of war, the mining minister says.      Full news...

RAWA News: A young girl was gang-raped, yet again, in Northern Afghanistan by three men. Bashira, a fourteen year old student of the sixth grade who had come to the city on Feb.18, 2008 to get the aid which was being distributed, was gang raped by three men in Sarpul province.      Full news...